The documentation of pupils in Swedish schools is extensive and a documentation culture has come to characterize the schools in recent years. In the context of decentralization and changing governance, focus has increasingly been directed towards assessment, follow-up and evaluation of pupils’ learning and social development. This article examines the Individual Educational Plans (hereafter IEP) used for pupils with special educational needs in Swedish compulsory schools from the perspective of text analyses based on discourse theory. The aim of this study is to shed light on how pupils are constructed in the school’s documentation. The study examines how these IEPs are used as a pedagogical technique for new ways of governing in order to impose self-regulation, individual responsibility and social control.The documents, which comprise the empirical material in this article, are gathered from 14 different schools and consist of documents for a total of 136 pupils with special educational needs

They come from the north-east. On competition between schools, and student identity in Swedish as a Second Language. Current educational policy in Sweden is characterized by individual choice. Many students who opt for city-centre schools are students with a first language other than Swedish, choosing a school where the majority of students speak Swedish as their first language. Our aim is to analyse the discursive practices discernible in the discourse about students of Swedish as a Second Language (SSL) in a city-centre school. The data are collected from an ethnographic inquiry undertaken in a compulsory school attended by children aged 10–12. The results show how a child’s identity as an SSL student is linked to a market view of education. The SSL student is not just one who has recently immigrated, as is stated in descriptions of the subject. Nor are all students offered education in SSL, since teachers and school leaders claim a lack of resources. In this discourse, SSL students are described as belonging to a category separate from the supposedly normal student. Students from suburban schools are described as substitutes for those living nearby. This has created a dilemma for the school, which risks losing its symbolic value as a “Swedish” school.

In this article, the theoretical framework of developmental pedagogy is presented as a tool in studying and developing children’s knowing within the arts. The domains of art focused on are music, poetry and dance/aesthetic movement. Through empirical examples from a large-scale research project, we illustrate the tools of developmental pedagogy and show how this perspective contributes to our understanding of children’s learning of music, dance and poetry. More specifically, we will analyse: (a) the important role of the teacher in children’s learning within the arts; (b) the importance of conversing when learning the arts; (c) what constitutes the knowledge, what we refer to as ‘learning objects’, to be appropriated within the three domains of art focused on; and (d) how to conceive of progression in children’s knowing within the arts.